Why Your Best People Are Quitting? 

If you’ve ever avoided a hard conversation about an underperformer, this will resonate.

A CPA owner lost two senior staff members after tax season last year – one in May, one in June. Both were solid performers, and both left for the same reason.

This is what happened:

This owner had an Operations & IT Manager on staff. The role was supposed to handle behind-the-scenes work – keep systems running, manage IT infrastructure, make sure nothing broke during tax season.

The owner thought he had made it very clear: no IT changes during tax season. Keep things stable while the team is slammed.

But this person wanted to prove their value, so they started making changes in February – system updates & “improvements” that required the team to learn different workflows in the middle of their busiest months.

The team pushed back. The owner knew something was amiss but didn’t intervene. By April, it was too late.

His two top senior accountants were frustrated, overworked, and dealing with problems that shouldn’t have existed. They weren’t just carrying their own load – they were compensating for the chaos this Manager was creating.

After tax season, this owner told me: “I knew that person was the issue. I knew it in March. But I didn’t want to have to have the hard conversation. As a result, I’ve lost the two people I actually needed, and I’m stuck with the one who caused the damage.”

This is the downside of avoiding hard decisions. You protect the wrong person because it feels easier in the moment, and your top people quit because they are not going to tolerate working around incompetence.

If you have someone on your team currently who’s causing more problems than they’re solving, your top people already know it. The question is: how long before they decide they’re done putting up with this.